So the other night I was rather frustrated with random items not only stuck in rooms, but stuck in rooms in large quantities. Example would be having 27 large signs in town square, or items that are typically not visible, but placed in a room to allow for textblock triggers. I think I ran up against this issue some years ago, but just accepted it for what it was and never bothered to do anything about it. I did a recent install for my stock realm a couple months ago and the same issue crept up. I has dozens of signs in sign rooms. Boulders visible but not getable in random rooms. Portals showing up in non-assigned rooms. Extra portals where there shouldn't be. etc etc etc.

I came here to look for a solution because I know I am not the only person that has had this problem. I've seen it even on BBS's from back in the day when mud was actively being worked on. I didn't find anything at all mentioning it, let alone giving me a place to start. I thought maybe there was a glitch from the install I had used, so I hopped up and found another and backed up my player files while the BBS was down for maintenance and did a fresh install of MajorMUD 1.11p. SAME PROBLEM. I like NMR for edits, so I thoguht id go into NMR and see what editing solutions I could find to fix this. Nothing. No batch action to remove items from rooms of this type. Making the items that I had at least witnessed personally del@maint did not help either (I assume those items must be exempt from cleanup and room sweeps). I ended up getting a wild hair and thought..hmmm...maybe the base install has the glitch in itself. I wonder if I replace it with the base backup file, will that copy act the same.

For anyone that doesn't know, you have files that are natural backups for your .dat files but have a .vir instead. You just have to remove the .dat on the current ones and change the .vir to .dat

I like dos, so I opened a command prompt and did the following:

ren wcc*.dat wcc*.original

ren wcc*.vir wcc*.dat

ren wcc*.original wcc*.vir

From doing that, my backup files have now traded places with my base files. I ran a recovery, did a cleanup, and BOOM. No items of any kind in any room that weren't supposed to be there. I copied my wccgang2.dat (dat file for the player's gangs) wccbank2.dat (dat file containing the bank balances of the players) wccuser2.dat (dat file containing player details) from the BBS backup I made before working on this problem and my player's data was brought back in and they never missed a beat.

Anything issues that require me to put in actual effort to fix like this, I post. It may not help anyone at the moment, but i've had old posts on things end up benefiting someone years later, so I figured I would at least post, and if it helps someone, cool.